While I made progress with a few hours of Diaspora API Dev yesterday it wasn’t until today that I finished my first code change towards the API: completing the Likes Endpoint.

Yep, two Diaspora API dev reports on one day.  After taking a break for dinner and just watching some TV I got back to figuring out how to properly interface with the authentication and API from an external client.  I was re-reading the OpenID spec, watching some videos, reading some presentations, et cetera.  If I’m going to be working on the API this is something I definitely need to be deep diving into a lot more.  My initial order of business however was just getting it working.

I’m only a few hours into getting fully going on the Diaspora API development project.  I had been pre-flying that whole experience earlier last week by studying the existing code base, familiarizing myself with the discussion threads et cetera.  Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to focus more on moving the ball forward as well.  Before really doing that though there is still a little ground work to do.

I can’t express how happy I am that I have the privilege of having a combination of time, ability, desire, and energy to contribute substantially to the Diaspora project right now.  Ever since I started using it in the spring it’s something I’ve wanted to be able to help with.  I certainly got my feet wet back then on some tweaks to the Twitter and Facebook interaction code, the latter of which is permamently broken thanks to Facebook’s new API spec.  With the amount of getting up to speed on Ruby, Rails, and the Diaspora code base I’m looking forward to helping tackle a much larger and persistently requested piece of code: a Diaspora API. 

I’m a bit baffled by this Motherboard article on “screwing ourselves” with the pursuit of thinness in laptops.  This is of course coming out of an Apple controversy where some bad software and a lot of tipping the scales in favor of form over function has lead to a haus looking laptop spec turning out some pretty bad real world performance numbers.  As has often been the case, once the initial outrage of some Apple stumble starts growing old people start looking around at other vendors and then the quiet problems of the industry are shown the light of day.  Apple’s MacBook Pro thermal problem is more egregious than others but turns out they all are essentially hobbling performance on their UltraBooks and compact laptop chassis making the list specs nothing real world.  Why are we surprised by this though?

Since the release of Ubuntu 18.04 I’ve been using it a bunch in various VMs.  I do love the new minimal install feature.  Even though it doesn’t save that much hard disk space it does make things a lot less  cluttered, which I absolutely love.  Because I work in VMs I’ve been experimenting with migrating OS’s up to 18.04 rather than crushing old VMs, building from scratch, and porting data over.  This process has worked almost seamlessly the dozen or so times I’ve done it across many VMs from various different baselines: Mainline 16.04, Mainline 17.10, Ubuntu MATE 16.04.  The actual core software itself seems to work perfectly fine out of the box, but as I said it is almost seamless not seamless.  There seems to be a bit of a wrinkle with the Ubuntu MATE update with respect to the VirtualBox Guest Additions, specifically with respect to shared folder drives.